Payment cards, such as credit cards and debit cards, are increasingly used in financial transactions. They are particularly widely used in consumer transactions, and are increasingly used in business-to-business transactions. Payment card transactions are simple and efficient: a buyer (referred to herein as a “client”) provides a supplier (referred to herein as a “merchant”) with an account identifier associated with a payment card to purchase desired item(s). Often, when the client is a business, the payment card and the transaction are associated with a purchase order identifying a number of items to be purchased. In some transactions, the client may desire to provide only a single account identifier to a merchant to purchase all of the items associated with a purchase order. Unfortunately, this can complicate matters for the merchant because the merchant may or may not be allowed to break the order into pieces for separate payment authorization and shipment.
For fraud and loss control purposes, some issuer financial institutions (“issuers”) and bankcard associations (such as, e.g., MasterCard International, Inc. and Visa International Service Association) generally require that an authorization request not be submitted for a transaction until goods associated with the transaction are available.
This can lead to problems in situations where only a portion of the goods to be purchased by a customer are available. A merchant may not be able to secure a payment card authorization until the remaining goods are available, leading to problems for merchants that closely manage inventory, fulfill from different fulfillment centers, or otherwise need to split orders into batches for fulfillment.
It would be desirable to provide systems and methods that allow an order to be associated with a single payment card number or identifier and that allow a merchant to split the order into multiple pieces (each, a “partial shipment”) and to receive an authorization for each of the partial shipments. Further, it would be desirable to provide systems and methods that allow the multiple authorizations to be made against the single account in quick succession or even substantially simultaneously. It would be further desirable to provide such partial shipments in conjunction with pre-authorization controls such as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,991,750, and 6,226,624 each of which are currently assigned to the assignee of the present application (and referred to generally herein as the “GECF Pre-Authorization Patents”), the contents of each of which are incorporated by reference herein in their entirety for all purposes.